The tumultuous and agonising transformation of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union in the first half of this century brought about dramatic changes in the size and structure of the population.

On the one hand, broadly in common with other industrialising countries – at first in Europe and then elsewhere – there was a long-term improvement in prosperity, living conditions and health provision affecting a large number of the population. In the mid-nineteenth century, birth rates and death rates were extremely high. But from the 1880s onwards both the death rate (CDR – crude death rate) and the birth rate (CBR – crude birth rate) in the Russian Empire as a whole steadily declined. This decline continued with interruptions through all the upheavals of the next eighty years, and by the 1960s the Soviet Union was already a society with the low birth rate and the low death rate characteristic of most industrialised countries. Simultaneously, the proportion of the population living in the towns greatly increased, from a mere 12–15 per cent in the 1890s to 33 per cent on the eve of the Second World War and over fifty per cent by the 1960s.

Our three decades were dominated, however, by three unprecedented demographic convulsions which distorted and disguised the long-term trends. In each case a large number of people died from violence, famine or epidemics; in the discussion which follows we shall refer to these premature deaths as ‘excess deaths’.